The English gardens of Cornwall

April 10, 2005|By Ray Moseley, Special to the Tribune.

On the day we visited, the Jungle Garden was closed because of recent rain and deep mud on the paths. But we still needed almost a half day to cover the part that remained open. That included an exquisite little Italian Garden, the Melon Garden, Sundial Garden, greenhouses for growing peaches, a walled Flower Garden, a walled Vegetable Garden, a vast area called Flora's Green that's bordered by rhododendrons and a fern-covered ravine.

In a small structure behind the Italian Garden, the excavators uncovered what in earlier days was known as a Thunderbox Room--that is, a set of privys for the garden staff. Some of them had etched their names on the walls before they went off to die in war. Not far from there is a bee-bole wall--a wall with recessed places intended to encourage bees to nest there. Next to it is a headache tree, which literally can produce severe headaches if you are incautious enough to smell the leaves.

The restoration of Heligan, which opened to the public in 1992 while still only partly uncovered, is to some extent an ongoing project. But even while devoting his attention to Heligan, Smit embarked on another ambitious enterprise--not a garden this time, but simply the world's largest greenhouse, containing 10,000 plants from around the world.

Known as the Eden Project, it consists of two huge geodesic domes nestled in an abandoned china clay quarry pit just north of St. Austell. The largest of the domes--they are called biomes--is 181 feet high, 792 feet long and 363 feet wide.

The purpose of the Eden Project is, in Smit's words, to help people learn that nature is a vital part of their life and not an accretion outside city walls. "The message is that, without plants, we would have no life on earth," he said.

The Eden Project opened in 2001 and was expected to draw more than 750,000 visitors a year. But in its first full year in 2002, it was visited by 1.8 million people, making it the third most popular paying attraction in Britain.

The larger biome is the Humid Tropical Zone; the other contains plants that thrive in a Warm Temperature Zone. Outside the biomes, climbing up terraced slopes leading to the top of the quarry, is a Temperate Zone, of which Britain is part, containing plants from the Himalayas, Chile, Australia and other regions.

But back to the gardens. After Heligan, our favorite was Trelissick, a beautifully landscaped garden spread over 30 acres with lovely views of the Fal River estuary south of Truro. The basic woodland framework was planted in the 19th Century, but in the 1930s the then owners laid out a complex network of lawns, flowerbeds, formal paths, shrubs and a shady dell.

The garden contains red rhododendron, many varieties of camellia, blue lace-cap hydrangeas, candelabra primulas and tall conifers. Borders around the lawns are planted with a wide range of trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants. There are Japanese cherry trees, maples and flowers ranging from skunk lily to daffodils to Himalayan cowslip.

Two of the gardens we visited, Trebah and Glendurgan, are neighbors, located on steeply wooded ravines bordering the Helford River just south of Falmouth near the village of Mawnan Smith. From the beach at Trebah, the U.S. 29th Infantry Division embarked in 1944 for the landing at Omaha Beach in Normandy.

Trebah was, like Heligan, neglected and overgrown until Tony Hibbert and his wife bought it in 1981. Hibbert intended the house on the site for a quiet retirement. But, like Smit, he became intrigued by the gardens and, in his 70s, set about energetically to restore them.

A stream cascades down the ravine over waterfalls, into ponds and on down through two acres of blue hydrangeas to the beach. Otherwise, Trebah seems more arboretum than flower garden, filled with towering oaks, beeches, magnolias and palms. It does not have the manicured look of many gardens. It is wild, open woodland interspersed with flowers such as camellias and rhododendron, plants such as gunnera manicata, bamboo and huge 100-year-old tree ferns imported from New Zealand.

Glendurgan is similar to Trebah, if somewhat less wild in aspect and containing a wider variety of trees and flowers--weeping swamp cypress, Japanese loquat, magnolias, cedars, pines, firs and weeping Mexican cypresses among the trees; Lent lilies, bluebells, columbines, yucca, primroses and a wide variety of rhododendron and camellias among the flowering plants.

A Holy Corner has trees and shrubs associated with the Bible: a yew, tree of heaven, olive, tree of thorns and a Judas tree. Elsewhere, there is a laurel maze that delights children and many adults.

Cornwall contains other elaborate gardens similar to those we visited. But it should be noted that there are also formal gardens of great beauty attached to stately homes, notably including Lanhydrock in the Fowey Valley near Bodmin and Cotehele on a bluff above the Tamar River north of Plymouth.